You may recall an ongoing blame battle between writer John Rozum and artist Scott McDaniel over the New 52 launch title STATIC. Rozum was the first of the New 52 creators to walk, and revealed it was because of creative differences with McDaniel. Now McDaniel has told HIS side of the story — in a 15,000 word novella that covers every moment of every conference call in minute depth. McDaniel says he has never written anything before, but he seems to have a great future as a court reporter.

There’s a ton of “he said/he said” going on in the post.

Looking back on the situation, I think John simply felt there was nothing he could contribute. I solved most of the story issues to Editorial’s satisfaction, not him, and he was relegated to scripting a novice’s plots. And that infuriated him.

For my part, I am ashamed of being so angry. I am not ashamed of the work I contributed, but of the manner in which I offered it at this time.

And again, I hurled no expletives, or personal insults or insults of any kind. I simply refused to lay down before the master, instead making him earn each step.

You may not be able to get through this blow by blow account so we’ll just agree with Graeme McMillan’s take — there are no good guys/bad guys, just guys with different views.

Reading the two together – and parsing out the passive aggressiveness in both – what becomes clear very quickly is a creative mismatch between McDaniel and Rozum’s sensibilities, as well as a horrendous breakdown in communications between editorial and the two creators; instead of there being any smoking gun of “He Said He Said” gossip or controversy here, it just seems sad and a wasted opportunity all round. Static Shock deserved better.

If you can get through the whole McDaniel piece, there is a lot of perhaps unintentional insight into the state of the DC office during the whole New 52 rollout, such as this:

Again, Harvey and I were very concerned about the sales trend on STATIC. Please recall this topic from earlier in my statement. This historic sales trend is no joke. It's real. Sales cool. Harvey and I feared that, as retailers were preparing to order #4 through #6, if they didn't see evidence of real story momentum and something important and cool happening that would attract additional readers, they would not change their historical ordering patterns and the book would simply slide into cancellation, if not by issue #6, then maybe by #8 or #10. Again, John expressed a contrary opinion. To him, that stuff wasn't worthy of consideration – only story mattered. And he was gonna bring the story.

Again and again McDaniel comes back to preoccupation with sales—parsing CBR polls and Diamond charts for any meaning. (Were McDaniels and editor Harvey Richards privy to the actual numbers, one wonders.) While this seems like anathema to the creative process, it was only common sense—this WAS a horse race and the slowest horses—Men of War, Mr. Terrific, etc — all got shot on the track just like Static.

Is this really where the Big Two gotten to as an industry? A desperate dash to sales at any cost?

Well, I think you can all answer that question for yourselves.

Back when we interviewed Jeffrey Brown about his movie at Sundance, he mentioned an upcoming humor book called Darth Vader and Son that features gentle humor on the topic of Darth as dad to Luke.

Well, he’s now posted some cover sketches on his blog.

And here’s the final cover.

The book is out from Chronicle in May.

Lauren Weinstein offers helpful hints on how to interpret online profile pictures. More tips in the link.

Here’s a perennial of comics lore that gets posted every once in a while. Chris Sims looks at Carson Van Osten’s ‘Comic Strip Artist’s Kit’ , a brief 8-page guide to solving the most common problems of comics prepared by Creative Services’ Van Osten. The above two-panel spread will give a sampling of its exceedingly basic yet hard to follow advice. Yep. Don’t be wooden, alright. Easy peazy! Entire life dreams have exploded over that little gem.

We can testify that as far as simple, clear storytelling goes, artists can still look at this and learn, even though it was devised in the ’80s or thereabouts.

Sims does not mention it, but whenever this strip is posted, we are contractually obligated to note that before he worked for Disney, Van Osten was the bass player in Todd Rundgren’s band, The Nazz. Because nothing prepares you for passing on cartoon advice from on high like being in a psychedelic rock band.

They won’t be out until TCAF in May, but here’s the scoop on two Koyama Press debuts, Jesse Jacobs’s BY THIS SHALL YOU KNOW HIM and Tin Can Forest’s WAX CROSS.

Artist and illustrator Jesse Jacobs—whose book Even the Giants (AdHouse, 2011) marked his major publishing debut after several award-winning, self-published titles—describes his new comic work, By This Shall You Know Him, as coming “out of the darkness of oblivion.” Within the book’s confines, Jacobs states that the reader will “bear witness to the limitless ambitions of a gang of celestial beings as they fiddle and fuss with all sorts of molecular arrangements, creating infinitely detailed patterns and strange new worlds brimming with bizarre life forms. Part art-book, part graphic novel, By This Shall You Know Him depicts all manner of beast running, crawling and slithering towards death’s cold embrace.”



Tin Can Forest (aka Pat Shewchuk and Marek Colek)—whose Koyama Press debut Baba Yaga and the Wolf was nominated for the 2011 Doug Wright Award for Best Emerging Talent, and won the duo the 2011 Joe Shuster Award for Outstanding Comic Book Cartoonist—will also release new work at TCAF. The artists describe their new book Wax Cross as “an alchemical folk-tale set in the twilight of the modern age, when the moon has devoured the sun, the mechanical ocean has evaporated into silence, and the decaying corpse of electric current sleeps eternally in a casket of orange lichen. Featuring a cast of characters as familiar as the faded Polaroids in a photo album salvaged from the flooded basement of a condemned church, Wax Cross presents illustrated transcriptions of ectoplasmic revelation, fibrous and grainy folklore, and unbridled bestial merriment, accompanied by textual incantations and occult decoration.”

Meet Ben McCool at JHU Wed, February 8!

On Wednesday, February 8 beginning at 6:00 pm, JHU Welcomes Back writer Ben McCoool (Choker, Memoir), signing copies of the brand new trade paperback of his Image series Pigs! All EXCLUSIVELY at Jim Hanley’s Universe in Manhattan, Where Fans and Creators Meet!

Gotta support the man. The trade collection has the sweet cover by Jock and an intro by Andy Diggle.

You may have noticed Google’s stylish doodle for the birthday of Charles Dickens today. But who drew it? an artist named Mike Dutton, who has previously worked on doodles for Richard Scarry, Mary Blair, the Royal Wedding, and the World Cup.

Mike said that while he normally works on his tablet, he had to go back to a physical drawing board for the Dickens doodle, creating each character separately so that he could place them within different parts of the Google logo. Like an engineer, he likes to iterate on what he designs until he gets it right.

You can see more of Dutton’s work at his website, where he has a ton of charming illos and even a few comics posted.

If you didn’t ever expect to see comics writing star Garth Ennis launching a Kickstarter program, you surely never expected to see him do it…for a kids’ book. But that’s exactly what is happening for a project calledERF, a sort of Finding Amoeba, featuring four lovable creatures plucked from the primordial ooze to find a better way of life:

ERF is the story of four friends at the dawn of time; Figwillop, KWAAAH!, the Booper, and Erf himself, and their adventures in the primordial world of long ago. The four take their first nervous steps out of the ocean and onto the shore, and are soon exploring the exciting new lands beyond. But danger lurks in the prehistoric jungle, and soon our heroes come face to face with the mighty and terrifying Colossux . . . An evolutionary tale of love and loyalty for children aged four and up.

The book is drawn by Rob Steen, illustrator of Rickey Gervais’s children’s series Flanimals, winner of the UK’s Galaxy Award for Best Children’s Book. Obviously, working with both Gervais and Ennis makes Steen the go-to-guy for making children’s fantasies that include dwarf kicking and exploding heads palatable.

We kid. In an email, Steen explained that although the book has some publisher interest they wanted to keep creative control, hence the move to self publishing.

ERF’s funding goal is $12,000 and it’s already up to nearly $2k, so go get in on some premiums.

Hoorah Big…Blue. Um. Anyway. As a Jets fan, The Beat doesn’t exactly root for the New Jersey Giants, but we are happy to see an area team triumph over its foes and represent Wall Street in the ticker tape parade category. So…YEAH. Butt in the backfield.

Meanwhile, irrepressible Lisa Hanawalt did some sketches of the game, including this:

The Puppy Bowl wasn’t so cute this year.

Rokuro Taniushi is a Japanese illustrator of the ’50s on who has been called “the kawaii Norman Rockwell of Japan” for painting some 1300 covers for the influential weekly magazine Shukan Shincho. Kawaii is the “cute” style of Japanese art, seen and deconstructed in everything from Hello Kitty to Murakami.

For more art, go to 50 Watts.

[Via Tim Hodler]

Giant Robot’s YEAR OF THE DRAGON art exhibit, themed around this year’s Chinese horoscope, is now online. It also serves as a farewell to BR employee Michelle Borok, who curated many exhibitions at the iconic LA store. You can view the entire exhibit here. Above, “Pink Mountains, Black Dragon” by Sara Saedi..

The artistic lineup:

Andrice Arp, Robert Bellm, Aaron Brown, Elliot Brown, Stasia Burrington, Bjorn Calleja, Ako Castuera, Sean Chao, Louise Chen, Shawn Cheng, James Chong, Luke Chueh, Chris Cilla, Jesse Fillingham, Cam Floyd, Harrison Freeman, Renee French, Gabe Gonzales, Kio Griffith, Joe Hahn, Nao Harada, Hiro Hayashi, David Horvath, Kerry Horvath, Martin Hsu, Mark Ingram, Mari Inukai, Elizabeth Ito, Marc Johns, Jeremiah LaTorre, Little Friends of Printmaking, Tessar Lo, Bradford Lynn, Miso, Gary Musgrave, Mark Nagata, Ming Ong, Martin Ontiveros, Sana Park, Sidney Pink, Jarrett Quon, Jesse Reklaw, Sara Saedi, Ryan Jacob Smith, Dave Stolte, Ken Taya, Edwin Ushiro, Christine Vincent, Steven Weissman, Heidi Woan, Yoskay Yamamoto, Jeni Yang, Yejin Oh, Sashiko Yuen